Thursday, January 22, 2009

I’m NOT DEAD YET

But I almost thought I was, today doing a few laps of breath control – which for me is about as close to drowning as I care to get.

Idea: let’s swim and not breathe.

Me: ok, that sounds well thought out. remember I’m the guy breathing EVERY STROKE and falling behind? I’ll try it though since there is no life guard and 80% of my lane is over 60 and would never notice if I was drowning because my swimming and my drowning look remarkably alike.

I did 4x masters swim this week. I thought my arms were going to fall off and then as I swam I never heard of that EVER, so I kept going. I’ve got 14.5 hours of training on my plate this week, which is tough, because Greta is no longer working and is going to start giving me the eye anytime I sneak out to exercise while she’s home with the kids (I did get her a brand new Nordic Track elliptical machine that Sada has actually used more than Greta has). Sorry… and we’ve got mid year business reviews and I’m the analyst who provides the data and now that MSFT is cutting jobs we HAVE TO SHOW THAT WE’RE MAKING PROGRESS. So that means lots of tables and charts and The Lorpeedo has the data. So I’m working a lot.

I am still sneaking in 20 mins of early AM yoga but I don’t let the dog out before I start because doing yoga and yelling ‘get the hell off Jack’ and having him nail-rape my legs as he jumps all over me – it wasn’t fun. It was like doing yoga with a fork in your spandex. His nails are sharp. I do it with coffee except now that I’ve dumped a cup ALL OVER THE CARPET, I leave it on the table for the rest I need between boat pose and downward dog.

I have no idea why anyone in the world would ever do yoga with other people unless the room is full of hot women and my pineapple isn’t hanging all out and they’re all struggling worse than me.

Strike that, I would never do yoga around other people. Pineapple show or not. Not even with a dog.

I’m also the only person who gets winded sitting and doing yoga.

I also am now almost done with my first week back with coach Tim Flemming. He’s way more fit than I am, so I keep doing what he says and my Poli Sci degree never covered lactate threshold and their impact on the constituency. They’re making me spin, which isn’t fun because I LOVE 83 rpm. At least I’m feeling better this week and my watts are up about 50 from last week, but I’m not 100%.

So then between yesterday and hearing about MSFT laying off 5,000 people and today – it was a good time to get some sleep and stress free workouts in. I think I slept none, even with sleeping pills and then I had a conf call with London and Japan (the guy in Japan will actually get on a call at 12:30am – animal). And then all day everyone IM’s back and forth wondering if anyone knows anything and I’m trying to work and then train a little and then wonder if I have a job.

I have a job, but more cuts. The reaper may return but hopefully not. He got 2 of my friends from Redmond.

Anytime I hear bad news I try and think about something positive and know that Ben does this all the time about living in Seattle and if he can find one good thing about Seattle then I sure can find something. I do have more friends to train with and when we move to Seattle we’ll save about $1,200+ a month in CA income tax (I claim like 331 on my form).

I also ran today after swimming for 1 hour and had an avg HR of 171 and a max of 185. I also weigh 4 lbs less than I did 2 weeks ago. The scale says 6 but I’m rounding down.

My legs are looking awesome too. I’ll have to take a photo soon but I’ll likely break the lens. I bet Greg looks at his abs more than I look at my legs though and I know Ben and Court look at each other’s legs and wonder whose is more veiney –cause I heard them say that once.

We’re a bunch of damn weridos.

I also found that if you call a fellow triathlete fat even though they’re not they have a pretty much completely ruined day.